Application of PDE methods for image-based concrete surface damage detection

Abstract

Tremendous progress has been achieved in image analysis and processing, and in particular, the use of partial differential equation (PDE) methods in image analysis has proliferated in recent years. However, PDE methods have seen little application to optical image-based structural damage detection for civil systems. This paper applies the Chan-Vese active contour model and its level set representation to detect concrete surface damage, in this case concrete cracks, in optical images. The detected cracks can be further characterized by extracted geometric quantities including their width, length and area of coverage, and associated with engineering design. With regard to crack width extraction, an approximate method is proposed, which relies on solving for a signed distance function. We test these methods by using synthetic images as well as real multi-temporal images from a laboratory experiment. This paper illustrates that using the proposed methods, cracks with complex topographical patterns can be successfully detected with sufficient accuracy.